Every hospital whose price file we could not use as published, and where the process stands. Updated October 6, 2026.
Where it stands. Of the 8 hospitals below, notices sent to 8, 1 replied and awaiting a corrected file or an explanation. While a row is open, every figure on this site that touches that hospital is flagged or excluded. A closed row is a hospital whose file is in use as published.
What the rule requires. Since 2021 every U.S. hospital has had to post a single machine-readable
file of its standard charges, including the rate it has negotiated with each insurer, in a format CMS specifies
(45 CFR 180; the CMS template, currently v3.0). The file has to be free, downloadable without
a login or a bot check, and findable from a cms-hpt.txt file at the hospital’s domain root.
A file that exists but cannot be read is, for a patient trying to compare prices, the same as no file.
What we do about it. When a file fails in our pipeline we first check that the failure is the file’s and
not ours: a second retrieval, a second parser, a read of the raw rows. If it holds, we write to the hospital’s
published price-transparency contact (the one named in its own cms-hpt.txt, or its billing office),
say exactly what is wrong, and ask for a corrected file. We wait ten business days. If there is no fix and no reply,
we file a complaint with CMS through its hospital price transparency complaint form and record the date here.
When a hospital replies, the row says so. When the file is fixed, or the hospital shows us the file was right and
we were wrong, we re-run it and close the row. This page records dates and status only; the correspondence itself
stays between us and the hospital.
The published file is not the machine-readable file the rule describes: a chargemaster with no payer-specific rates, a workbook served under a .csv name, a dead link in the hospital’s own cms-hpt.txt, or a file with no billing codes on its rows.
| Hospital | Where it stands | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Caldwell Regional Medical Center (no prices on the site) | Notice sent Sep 16, 2026 | Notice sent |
| Hillsboro Community Hospital (no prices on the site) | Notice sent Sep 16, 2026 | Notice sent |
| Wamego Health Center Ascension |
Notice sent Sep 16, 2026; hospital replied, awaiting a corrected file or an explanation | Hospital replied |
The file exists and downloads, but no procedure in our 107-item basket could be matched to a payer-specific dollar amount: codes missing, the payer column empty, or the required columns absent. The hospital appears on the site with no prices.
| Hospital | Where it stands | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Coffey County Hospital (no prices on the site) Coffey Health System |
Notice sent Sep 16, 2026 | Notice sent |
| Comanche County Hospital (no prices on the site) | Notice sent Sep 16, 2026 | Notice sent |
| Minimally Invasive Surgery Hospital (no prices on the site) | Notice sent Sep 16, 2026 | Notice sent |
For at least half of the hospital’s commercial plans, the amount in the “negotiated rate” column is identical to the gross charge. A negotiated rate that equals list price is not a negotiated rate; the cells are flagged and left out of every median on this site until the file is fixed.
| Hospital | Where it stands | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Kearny County Hospital | Notice sent Sep 16, 2026 | Notice sent |
| Wichita County Health Center | Notice sent Sep 16, 2026 | Notice sent |
Hospitals that are exempt from the rule (federal facilities, and campuses that publish under a parent hospital’s license) are not counted above. Quality flags on individual prices, as opposed to whole files, are described on the methodology page. The complete log for every state is in Data & research.